VEGETARIANISM AS RELATED TO OTHER REFORMS
It is sometimes held by the champions of vegetarianism that reform of diet is the starting-point and foundation-stone of all other reform—a panacea for the ills and maladies of the world. This over-estimate on the part of a few enthusiasts of an unpopular cause is due, presumably, to a revolt from the contrary extreme of depreciation; for a little thought must show us that, in the complexity of modern life, there is no such thing as a panacea for social ailments, and that, as there is no royal road to knowledge, so there is no royal road to reform. It is impossible for vegetarianism to solve the social question, unless by alliance with various other reforms that are advancing pari passu—so interlocked and interdependent are all these struggles towards freedom. It has been well said that, "By humanitarians, socialists, vegetarians, anti-vivisectionists, teetotalers, land-reformers, and all such seekers of human welfare, this must be borne in mind—that each of their particular efforts is but a detail of the whole work of social regeneration, and that we cannot rightly understand and direct our own little piece of effort unless we know it, and pursue it, as part of the great whole."[[55]]
Still more mistaken, on the other hand, is that common prejudice against food reform which would exclude it altogether from the dignity of propagandism, and would limit it to the personal practice of individuals. "There can be no objection," says Dr. Burney Yeo, "to individuals adopting any kind of diet which they may find answer their needs and minister to their comfort; it is only when they attempt to enforce what they practise on others that they must expect to encounter rational opposition."[[56]] Unfortunately, we have learnt by bitter experience that rational opposition is the last thing we can expect to encounter—as, indeed, is made sufficiently evident by Dr. Yeo's argument. For how could individual vegetarians have ever heard of the new diet except for the propaganda? And why have vegetarians, as a body, less right than teetotalers, socialists, or any other propagandists, not to "enforce," but to advocate their philosophy of diet with the view of ultimately influencing public opinion? This professional attempt to class vegetarianism as an idiosyncrasy, and not a system, is as irrational as it is insincere, and what its insincerity is may be seen from the fact that, though we are told at one moment that "there can be no objection" to individual practice of the diet, yet whenever individuals do attempt to practise it, they meet with the strongest possible objection from the doctors themselves!
Thus it comes about that in this progressive age, and even among those who label themselves "progressives," vegetarianism is so frequently regarded as a mere whim and crotchet, with no practical bearing on the forward movement of to-day. It is a marvel that so many "advanced" journals, which have a good word for a host of worthy causes that are fighting an uphill battle against monopoly and injustice—social reform, land reform, law reform, prison reform, hospital reform, and a hundred more—are dumb as death, or speak only to sneer, when the subject is food reform; and thus lead their readers to suppose that, whereas on all other matters there has been a great change of feeling during the past half-century, on the one matter of diet there has been no sort of progress! Yet they might easily learn, if they made serious inquiry, that the reformed dietetics, so far from being the outcome of mere sentiment about animals, have a past record based as surely on moral and scientific reasoning as that of any cause included in the progressive programme. Vegetarianism is, in truth, progressiveness in diet; and for a progressive to scout such ideas as valueless and Utopian is to play the part (as far as diet is concerned) of a reactionist. What is the meaning of this strange discrepancy? It must mean, we fear, that to a large number of our social reformers the reform of other persons is a much more congenial battle cry than the reform of one's self. Hinc illæ lacrymæ. They call vegetarianism "impracticable" for the strange reason that, unlike most isms, it asks them to do something individually which they know they could do—if they wished! It is impracticable because it does not suit them to practise it.
Reformer: Let me entreat you; give up this fanciful scheme of vegetarianism and come and work for social reform.
Vegetarian: Social reform without food reform! Is not that rather a lame and lop-sided business?
Reformer: Not at all. When we have so many things to do we must do the most important ones first.
Vegetarian: And what are the most important?
Reformer: Well, there is international peace and arbitration. You will admit that our first duty is to avoid unnecessary bloodshed.
Vegetarian: Ah, I see! And the habit of living by bloodshed doesn't come within your scope!
Reformer: Then there is the land question, and the need of relieving the congestion of our crowded cities by the revival of agriculture.
Vegetarian: So, of course, you can't attend to a diet-system which would bring people back to the land!
Reformer: There is also the temperance problem—the terrible evils of the drink crave.
Vegetarian: Which would disappear for the most part if we left off eating flesh.
Reformer: And the welfare of animals—for to that also I devote myself. We need some stringent legislation for the better prevention of cruelty.
Vegetarian: We do. But as such legislation would leave your reformers dinnerless, don't you think you should revise your dietary meantime? Your reforms are excellent, I grant you; but what of self-reform? Does not reform, like charity, begin at home?
Reformer: Well, well; to everyone his taste—reform or self-reform. I prefer the former; you the latter, I suppose.
Vegetarian: No; that is just where you are mistaken. I prefer both at once.
Reform and self-reform, not reform or self-reform—that is the true key to the solution of the social question. The work that we can do ourselves is the most wholesome condiment for the work that we can only do through society. And here let me express the hope that, as a matter of policy, vegetarians will stand aloof from all "philanthropic" schemes of vicarious food reform in prisons, reformatories, and workhouses; for there is no surer way of making a principle unpopular than by forcing it on the poor and helpless, while carefully avoiding it one's self. Philanthropists, if they be philanthropists, will practise what they preach; by their practice we shall know them.
To the so-called ethical, no less than to the political, school of thought the question of vegetarianism is unwelcome, obtruding as it does on the polite wordiness of learned discussion with an issue so coarsely downright: "You are a member of an ethical society—do you live by butchery?" But the ethics of diet are the very last subject with which a cultured ethical society would concern itself, and the attitude of the modern "ethicist" towards the rights of animals is still that of the medieval schoolman. The ethicist does not wish to forego his beef and mutton, so he frames his ethics to avoid the danger of such mishap, and while he talks of high themes with the serene wisdom of a philosopher the slaughter-houses continue to run blood. We surmise that the royal founder and archetype of ethical societies was that learned but futile monarch referred to in the epitaph:
Here lies our mutton-loving king,
Whose word no man relies on:
He never said a foolish thing,
And never did a wise one.
So, too, throughout the whole field of hygiene, temperance, and plain living, to ignore vegetarianism is to ignore one of the most potent influences for self-restraint. One is reluctant to quote the late Sir Henry Thompson in any matter that tends to the praise of vegetarianism, in view of the extreme irritability which that distinguished scientist exhibited as regards his sacred text, with which you could never take the liberty of assuming that, when it distinctly said one thing, it did not mean the opposite; yet he did say that "a proportion amounting at least to more than one-half of the disease which embitters the middle and latter part of life, among the middle and upper classes of the population, is due to avoidable errors in diet."[[57]] If this be so, it is obvious that diet reform (of some sort) is very urgently needed; and I submit that it would be difficult to frame any intelligible scheme of diet reform in which vegetarian principles should play no part, embracing, as they do, all the best features of temperance and frugality. What is the use of for ever preaching about the avoidance of luxuries and stimulants, if you rule out of your system the one dietary which makes stimulants and luxuries impossible? The relation of vegetarianism to temperance, of the food question to the drink question, is that of the greater which includes the less.
But it is when we turn from philanthropy to zoophily, and to the questions more particularly affecting the welfare of animals, that the importance of vegetarianism, in spite of the stubborn attempts of the old-fashioned "animal lovers" to overlook it, is most marked. Here, again, I do not share the extreme vegetarian view that food reform is the foundation of other reforms, for I think it can be shown that all cruelties to animals, whether inflicted in the interests of the dinner-table, the laboratory, the hunting-field, or any other institution, are the outcome of one and the same error—the blindness which can see no unity and kinship, but only difference and division, between the human and the non-human race. This blindness it is—this crass denial of a common origin, a common nature, a common structure, and common pleasures and pains—that has alone hardened men in all ages of the world, civilised or barbarous, to inflict such fiendish outrages on their harmless fellow-beings; and to remove this blindness we need, it seems to me, a deeper and more radical remedy than the reform of sport, or of physiological methods, or even of diet alone. The only real cure for the evil is the growing sense that the lower animals are closely akin to us, and have rights.
And here we see the inevitable logic of vegetarianism, if our belief in the rights of animals is ever to quit the stage of theory and enter the stage of fact; for just as there can be no human rights where there is slavery, so there can be no animal rights where there is eating of flesh. "To keep a man, slave or servant," says Edward Carpenter, "for your own advantage merely, to keep an animal that you may eat it, is a lie; you cannot look that man or animal in the face." I am not saying that it is not a good thing that, quite apart from food reform, anti-vivisectionists should be denouncing the doings of "the scientific inquisition," while humanitarians of another school are exposing the horrors of sport, for cruelty is a many-headed monster, and there must at times be a concentration of energy on a particular spot; but I do say that any reasoned principle of kindness to animals which leaves vegetarianism outside its scope is, in the very nature of things, foredoomed to failure.[[58]]
Vegetarianism is an essential part of any true zoophily, and the reason why it is not more generally recognised as such is the same as that which excludes it from the plan of the progressive—that it is so upsetting to the every-day habits of the average man. Few of us, comparatively, care to murder birds in "sport," and still fewer to cut up living animals in the supposed interests of "science," but we have all been taught to regard flesh food as a necessity, and it is a matter, at first, of some effort and self-denial to rid ourselves of complicity in butchering. Herein is at once the strength and the weakness of the case for vegetarianism—the strength as regards its logic, and the weakness as regards its unpopularity—that it makes more direct personal demand on the earnestness of its believers than other forms of zoophily do; for which reason there is a widespread, though perhaps unconscious, tendency among zoophilists to evade it.
Yet that such evasion is a blunder may be seen from the outcry raised against it not by vegetarians only, but by the vivisectionists and sportsmen themselves, who are quick to ask the zoophilists why, if they are so eager for the well-being of the animals, they do not desist from eating them—a question which, however insincere in the mouths of some who propound it, must at least be allowed to be logical. For it is simple truth that though vivisection is a more refined and diabolical torture, and sport a more stupidly wanton one, the sum of suffering that results from the practice of flesh-eating is greater and more disastrous than either, and by being so familiarly paraded in our streets is a cause of wider demoralisation. When one thinks of the aimless and stunted life, as well as the barbarous death, of the wretched victims of the slaughter-house, bred as they are for no better purpose than to be unnaturally fattened for the table, it makes one marvel that so many kindly folk, keenly sensitive to the cruelties inflicted elsewhere, should be utterly deaf and blind to the doings of their family butcher. The zoophilist loves to quote the famous lines of Coleridge:
He prayeth best who loveth best
All things both great and small.
But what kind of "love" is that which eats the object of its affection? There are hidden rocks in that poetical passage which a sense of humour should indicate to the pilot of zoophily.
Our position, therefore, is this—that while we make no exaggerated claim for vegetarianism, as in itself a panacea for human ills and animal sufferings, we insist on the rational view that reform of diet is an indispensable branch of social organisation, and that it is idle to talk of recognising "rights of animals" so long as we unconcernedly eat them. Vegetarianism is no more and no less than an essential part in the highly complex engine which is to shape the fabric of a new social structure, an engine which will not work if a single screw be missing. The part without the whole is undeniably powerless; but so also, as it happens, is the whole without the part.